Social Media Marketing: LinkedIn’s New Website Demographics Feature

Love it or hate it, one of LinkedIn’s most distinctive features is the old “Who’s Viewed Your Profile” function. Any working professional knows this feeling well—a notification that alerts you if someone—old flames and old coworkers alike—has clicked on your profile.

A relic of the bygone Friendster era, this feature is useful—perhaps a bit creepy for many of the platforms’ users—for learning more about your target audience.

A quick explainer:

LinkedIn allows you to see everyone who has checked your profile in the past 90 days. And for premium users, you’ll also get weekly insights and trends—a look at the type of people who have an interest in what you or your company does.

Now, the creators of LinkedIn are taking this same feature and applying it to a new medium: websites.

What is LinkedIn Website Demographics?

LinkedIn Website Demographics pulls data from LinkedIn’s 500 million users which helps to provide insight into what types of users are visiting your company’s website.

Visitors are broken down according eight different reporting metrics, including:

Job title

Industry

Job seniority

Job function

Company

Company size

Location

Country

The fact that the platform takes this information and condenses it down into clear visitor groups is pretty darn cool. While you’re only getting a look at those user groups who are part of the LinkedIn community, many marketers are getting a large sample size to draw from—a sample size that stands to inform your understanding of your target audience in a big way.

And like most analytics suites, LinkedIn Website Demographics gives you the option to filter visitors by a specific date range. This is especially useful as it allows you to see if any website changes have had any effect on visitor activity.

LinkedIn Web Demographics are free to anyone that uses LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager feature, according to Sudeep Eldo Cherian, LinkedIn Marketing Solutions’ director of global product marketing. And no, users are not required to advertise on LinkedIn to use this (similar to the premise behind Google Keyword Planner, an Adwords tool).

The company hopes that this feature will encourage more LinkedIn users to use the solution and that new insights will encourage more users to create campaigns.

How to Set up LinkedIn Website Demographics

1. Set up your LinkedIn Ads Account

To set up LinkedIn Website Demographics, you’ll first need to sign up for a LinkedIn Ads account. It’s easy to do and best of all? It’s free.

If you’re new to LinkedIn advertising, you’ll be required to create an account for your business, and if you’re also new to Campaign Manager, you’ll be prompted to set up your first ad to set up your advertising account. You don’t have to actually run the campaign; the platform just walks you through the process.

Once you’re in, go to the Campaign Manager and click on your name.

2. Set up Your First Ad

It’s fairly straightforward but the steps are as follows:

Select an ad format.

If you select text ads, you’ll be able to link it to a company page or a showcase page

Name your ad campaign.

Save as a draft—your best option if you don’t actually plan on running the ad.

After doing so, you will be taken back to the Campaign Manager dashboard.

3. Set up your Insight Tag

From the Campaign Manager dashboard, click on Website Demographics. When you’re on the page, click “Set Up Your Insight Tag.”

What the Insight Tag does is provide you with a short Javascript code. You’ll insert the code into your website, which gives LinkedIn permission to track your page’s visitors and provide analytics.

If the Website Demographics link isn’t available on your dashboard, find the Insight Tag option in your Account Assets menu. If the Insight Tag option isn’t available, click on the option that reads, Matched Audiences.

From there, you can create a Custom Audience for your website visitors. Building a new audience will give you the Insight Tag.

Once you’ve obtained your Insight Tag, you can copy-paste it to the backend of your website. According to LinkedIn, the best place to put this is just before the end of the <body> tag, in the global footer (alongside other similar Javascript codes, like a Google Analytics tag, that need to persist on every page).

Once you’ve inserted the code, add your domain/s to the area on the right side of the box where you copied the code.

Just a quick note:

Make sure the domain does not contain a “www” before it, as per LinkedIn policy. LinkedIn needs to verify the Tag before you can get started, which can take up to 24 hours.

Forgetting to take off the “www” is a definite way to get denied, thus forcing you to start the process all over again. You’ll know the domains are ready when they have a ‘verified’ sign next to its name on the list.

Make Use of Matched Audiences

Now that your setup is complete, it’s time to build up your audience.

Say the goal is to drive a different audience to a specific landing page than to a blog post—the Matched Audiences feature allows you to create audience profiles tailored to a particular flow of traffic.

Your next move is to click the Create an Audience button. The reason for this is that creating a matched audience targeting website visitors who click on individual pages gives you an easy way to compare website demographics for all visitors versus only those who convert.

Meaning, you’ll have a way to dig deeper, looking at someone who read a series of blog posts and checked out your “Services” page, versus someone who took one of your desired goal actions: filled out a form, subscribed to a newsletter, or made a purchase.

It’s a great insight into how people move through the buyer’s journey and where they drop off.

Making Sense of the Data

Another critical detail is, your website needs to attract visitors before you can leverage your insight into the tailored marketing approach that drives sales (ideally). Your domain needs to receive 300 LinkedIn member-visitors minimum before you have access to any useful data on your Website Demographics dashboard.

Once you do, you’ll be able to view data according to all of your website visitors or specific audience segments (based on your matched audiences). You’ll also be able to compare data from one audience against another (website visitors versus leads, for example, or blog readers versus customers) and see data for a specific time range or for all time.

Drive Traffic with LinkedIn Website Demographics

Although it might be a little hard to see the connection right off the bat, LinkedIn Website Demographics can be an advantageous feature for building powerful customer personas. The technology gives you insights into the kind of people who may truly be interested in buying what you’re selling.

Another nice thing about it is, this platform is already connected to LinkedIn Ads. Not only will it be easy to retarget website visitors with the platform’s ad capabilities, but you’ll also have usable data that can transfer to other uses: direct mail, email marketing, and content generation.

At Results Driven Marketing, we make it our mission to drive your target audience straight to your webpage. We’ll help you tailor your marketing strategy to get more conversions, whether that traffic comes from LinkedIn, Google, or elsewhere on the web. Call us today at 215-393-8700 to get the process started!

Maddy Osman creates engaging content with SEO best practices for marketing thought leaders and agencies that have their hands full with clients and projects. Learn more about her process and experience on her website, www.The-Blogsmith.com and read her latest articles on Twitter: @MaddyOsman.